time together

Have you ever had the experience of looking at your spouse in thinking, “We use to be so close. How did we drift apart? What happened?” If you have, you are not alone. I think that thought crosses the mind of nearly every spouse at one time or another.

Marriage can be like a boat without an anchor. It has a tendency to drift. In the beginning, when you’re close to shore, it doesn’t seem like a problem. But the further you get from shore the more prominent and problematic the drift can be. You start to experience things like:

“Acting for the first time in 14 years, the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology redefined high blood pressure as a reading of 130 over 80, down from 140 over 90. The change means that 46 percent of US adults, many of them under the age of 45, now will be considered hypertensive.” (bostonglobe.com)

High blood pressure is considered the “silent killer,” because when you have high blood pressure, there are typically no obvious signs. Many people who have high blood pressure feel just fine. But the undetected increase in blood pressure puts them at increased risk of heart disease, disability, and death.

What does this have to do with marriage…beside the fact that I’m going to have to change my diet and exercise? Just like high blood pressure can be a silent killer physically, there are some things that can be silent killers to your marriage relationally. Here are a just few…

My wife and I recently returned home from a five day trip to Washington D.C. Actually, if you include a day to drive there and a day to drive back, it was more like a three day trip to D.C.

After three days of walking over 13 miles to see the iconic sites, and two days of traffic laden driving, we were glad to be home. After unpacking, my wife sat in her chair and I sat in mine, enjoying a very boring evening of quietly surfing social media.

If you read stuff on marriage (including my stuff), you can easily walk away thinking that a good marriage is one where you and your spouse are regularly:

When I hear the word “gravity,” I think of different things. I think of an apple falling on Newton’s head. I think of the John Mayer song, “Gravity.” I think of giant pieces of space junk falling from the sky and wiping out my house…and my homeowners insurance refusing to cover it.

But I don’t usually think of marriage when I hear the word, “gravity.” What does gravity have to do with marriage any way…aside from the fact it bears down on all of us, causing us to shrink and sag?

Ok, confession time. When I was a teenager, I got stuck parking. I’m not talking about parking your car in a parking spot at Walmart. I’m talking about getting stuck on some deserted back road because I wanted to “spend some time” with a girl.

I will avoid the details to spare myself the painful self-disclosure, but I remember that feeling of being stuck. My first thought was, “This is no big deal. I’ll just get out and rock the car a little.” When that didn’t work, I thought, “Ok. I just need a little traction.” So I put rocks, limbs, and anything I could find under the rear wheels to give me some traction. Then I got behind the car to push, telling my girlfriend to give it some gas. Those of you who are smarter than me can guess what happened next. I was bathed in a hail of mud, rocks, and sticks…but the car remained stuck.

When I stepped into the waiting room, I noticed that Bryan and Christine (not their real names) were sitting in separate chairs and weren’t talking. As they took separate seats in my office, I asked them why they had come to counseling. The question was met with sighs and silence. After some awkward attempts to get Bryan to go first, Christine finally said, “We’re really struggling in our marriage. ” From there, the story began to roll out.

They were once good friends and playful lovers who talked, laughed, and spent time together. But now they were more like room mates who only talked when they needed to. Christine was focused on their 3 active kids and the mounds of laundry and homework that came with them. Bryan was focused on the increasing demands of providing for their family, and the occasional game of golf. Their time together was spent discussing kids, schedules, or money. This seemed to be the only thing holding them together.

Attention is like air to our emotional lungs. Without attention, babies fail to thrive. Without attention, children struggle emotionally and scholastically. Without attention, isolated people become loners and sometimes threats to society. Without attention, marriages flame out like cooling fireworks falling to earth. Without attention, the light in a senior’s eyes quickly dims.

Every soul needs attention, but attention is the one thing that we cannot get for ourselves. (Yes, yelling “fire” in a crowded theater will get you attention, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.) Attention – the kind brings life to our soul – cannot be taken. It must be given as a gift.

What’s a good marriage look like? Even if we don’t ask this question out loud, we all wonder what a good marriage really looks like. Maybe you have your own ideas about what a good marriage looks like. When you think about a good marriage, maybe you picture a husband and wife…